Cherokee Strip Museum and Rose Hill School

Perry did not exist on the morning of September 16, 1893. There was a land office and a post office on bare prairie, named for J. A. Perry, one of the men the government sent to lay out the land-office towns, and the railroad depot stood a mile south at a siding called Wharton. At the noon gunshot the Cherokee Outlet opened, and an estimated 25,000 people spent the first night in Perry. Lumber shipped illegally to Wharton in a bundle labeled Land Office let buildings go up at once, and a saloon opened by four. This time, the Oklahoma Historical Society notes, photographers were on hand, because newspapers and magazines that had no pictures of the earlier runs were offering more than a farm was worth.

Trains stopped at Wharton but not at Perry, so freight was hauled across Cow Creek with no way to know whether it had arrived, until a telephone line reached the siding late in 1893.

The Cherokee Strip Museum, an Oklahoma Historical Society affiliate run with the Cherokee Strip Historical Society, follows the Outlet from the opening to the 1930s with rotating exhibits, a blacksmith shop with demonstrations, a farm implement building and the Rose Hill School, a one-room schoolhouse of 1895 where third and fourth graders spend a school day set in 1910. Its account begins with the treaty that gave the Cherokee Nation a perpetual outlet west, and the nations later moved onto its eastern part: the Osage, Kaw, Ponca, Pawnee, Nez Perce, Otoe-Missouria and Tonkawa.